The Integration Decision

What’s next for educators, and for society, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling?

When the U.S. Supreme Court, in June
of last year, suddenly decided after the
appointment of Justice Samuel A.
Alito Jr. to take two school desegregation
cases very similar to one from Massachusetts
it had shortly before refused to review, some experts
predicted a decisive shift, one that would
perhaps even undermine the 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, a higher education case that
left intact affirmative action precedents.

In late June of this year, after waiting until the
last day of the term to render its decision in cases
reviewing race-conscious student-assignment plans
in Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., the court sent
a muddled message. Four justices disputed four
other justices on almost everything, including the
very basic meaning of Brown v. Board of Education,
while one generally conservative judge, Anthony M.
Kennedy, agreed in part with each group and determined
what the U.S. Constitution means in this
area, at least until the Supreme Court speaks
again. ("Use of Race Uncertain for Schools," July 12, 2007.)

The debate among lawyers about the legal origin
and reasoning of these three opinions—majority,
concurring, and dissenting—will go on and on. In
the meantime, school people need to know what
they can and cannot do, since the decision has outlawed
most of the existing plans in districts not
now under a court order, and has not clearly
spelled out answers to the most important challenges
districts now face.

If the law and social science recognize the importance of integrated schools, what are educators to do to actually create or retain integrated schools?

Last month's ruling, in Parents Involved in
Community Schools v. Seattle School District
and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education,
caps decades of backing away from the
mandate of Brown, the historic case that struck
down segregated schooling in 1954. The first of
the major decisions to do so was the Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1974, which essentially eliminated
the possibility of desegregating across district
boundary lines, preventing meaningful desegregation
in many metropolitan areas in the
Northeast and Midwest. In the 1990s, in a series
of three decisions, the Supreme Court limited the
duration of desegregation efforts required by districts
that had once enforced segregated schools.
Districts could be declared “unitary,” or free of the
vestiges of a dual system; any remaining racial
segregation or inequality was assumed to be a result
of private action, and neighborhood-school
plans restoring segregation could be instituted.

Desegregation had been declining for 16 years before
the June 28 decision, particularly in the South,
where many mandatory desegregation plans had
ended and districts had switched to school choice
plans or neighborhood schools. The typical black
student in the South, for example, now attends a
school where the enrollment is only 27 percent
white, down from over 43 percent less than two
decades ago. Nationally, nearly 40 percent of all
black and Latino students attend intensely segregated
schools, where fewer than 10 percent of students
are white. White students remain the most
isolated group.

Voluntary race-conscious integration is a limited
tool to maintain racially diverse schools, employed
by districts that value such schools’ educational and
social benefits for students and their communities.
In the cases decided by the Supreme Court, the
policies were attempts by locally elected school
boards to allow a great deal of parental choice of
schools, but with a guideline to ensure that the
racial compositions of schools were not segregated—a guideline which only altered the school assignments of a very small percentage
of district students, but
was necessary to prevent racial resegregation.
Surveys in both districts
showed that students of all
racial and ethnic backgrounds felt
very positive about their interracial
educational experience. The
policies were necessary because,
despite the passage of more than
50 years since the Brown decision
and 40 years since the enactment
of the federal Fair Housing Act,
many American communities
are deeply segregated. And unrestricted
school choice plans,
adopted in many in the early
1960s, often tended to increase
segregation.

In the court’s divided opinions,
five justices endorsed the
compelling educational benefits
of integrated schools. Despite
the judicial trend toward
resegregation, social science
evidence and educational experience
confirm the multifaceted
benefits of integrated
schools for students and the
harmful effects of segregation.
The harms of segregated, or
racially isolated, schools were recognized
by the Supreme Court in
Brown and have been extensively
documented by social scientists.
Five hundred fifty-three scholars
from 201 universities and research
centers around the country filed a
"social science statement" with
the court last fall summarizing a
half-century of research on these
topics. There is also growing evidence
that the benefits of an integrated
school can be enhanced
depending on what happens
within the school.

If the law and social science recognize
the importance of integrated
schools, what are educators,
community leaders, and
parents to do to actually create or
retain integrated schools? Unfortunately,
the tools have been limited,
but there is plenty of time for districts
to consider what might
work, consult with researchers
ready to help, and examine the experiences
of other districts. Despite
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s
insistence that Brown means there
can be no consideration of a student’s
race in assigning students to
schools for desegregation (an insistence
that many find a preposterous
rewriting of history), research
on the effect of race-neutral student
assignment finds consistently
that districts which eliminate race-conscious
assignment plans experience
growing numbers of schools of
concentrated poor and minority
students and associated growth of
academic inequality. Thus, school
systems should carefully consider
the experiences of other districts
before eliminating race as a factor
in assigning students.

Research finds that districts which eliminate race-conscious assignment plans experience growing numbers of schools of concentrated poor and minority students.

Districts now under court orders
and considering unitary status
should press the “stop” button
immediately until they understand
what they can lose if those
orders end. Under this decision,
no change in court-ordered plans
is needed. As soon as a court
order is terminated, however, the
very magnet school assignment
plan that may have produced integrated
and successful magnet
schools in a district becomes illegal,
and the school board has to
find a new plan—or, in most
cases, let resegregation take away
much of the accomplishment.
There is now a strong need for
educators to hold on to the flexibility
that often comes with court-ordered
choice plans.

Types of plans that are clearly
legal for districts include those
that alter attendance zones and
take into account the racial
and/or poverty composition of
neighborhoods to create a racial
mix of students in schools. Other
mechanisms to produce integrated
schools include placing
new schools in areas where they
would naturally draw students
from diverse backgrounds. The
court’s decision addressed only
race-conscious efforts to integrate
schools, meaning that any policies
that do not explicitly consider students’
race or ethnicity in making
decisions about school attendance
are untouched—although it is unlikely
that such plans would be as
effective in most districts.

In recent decades, districts that
were pursuing desegregation also
sought to offer increased choices
for families. Ironically, one of the
side effects of the new decision
might be districts’ being forced to
choose between educational choice
and diversity unless they devise a
multidimensional method of evaluating
students’ choices, one in
which race is only one of several
factors, such as socioeconomic status,
parental education, native language,
and academic achievement.
There are no guidelines from the
justices on what a multidimensional
model would be. But the decision
does sustain Grutter, the
court’s ruling four years ago, and
the factors that colleges use for
admissions would probably be relevant
to consider—although needing
adjustments for students’ ages.

Districts employing choice-based
plans need good information
centers to make sure that information
about school choices is
equally available to people of all
backgrounds. Outreach to students
by magnet schools, or under
other choice plans, to generate applications
from a diverse group of
students is also acceptable according
to the decision, and such
actions could help ensure that
choice plans create integrated
schools. A school drawing diverse
groups of students also needs to
carefully welcome and integrate
students from all groups within
the school and in all aspects of
school life; in this, providing
training to teachers to teach in
multiracial classrooms is critical.

In a nation whose student population
is almost one-fifth Latino
and one-twentieth Asian, black-white
desegregation plans are no
longer adequate. If a district has a
multiracial enrollment, its plan
should reflect this reality and not
simply divide students into white
and nonwhite, for example. If there
is a large Latino population in a
district, creating two-way bilingual
programs at schools will both naturally
desegregate these schools
and offer an enriched educational
opportunity for students that justifies
the use of such a program.

These policies are more administratively
burdensome for school districts, and it
may take several attempts
before a given district determines
which plan is best, given its student
composition and educational
goals. But adjusting policies will be
less burdensome than restoring
segregation, which produces growing
inequality, higher dropout
rates, faculty instability in schools
with high numbers of poor students
or students of color, and frequent
sanctions under federal and
state accountability systems. Not
all of these problems will automatically
occur everywhere, but research
suggests that these conditions
are likely to occur when race-conscious
policies are abandoned.

Now is a good time to recognize
that integration cannot be accomplished
by schools alone. In the
long term, more-comprehensive
measures are needed in many
communities. Actively enforcing
fair-housing policies and supporting
integrated neighborhoods is
critical. In fact, communities that
partner school integration efforts
with housing-integration efforts
have experienced stable, long-lasting
integration.

The challenge for educators and our society is ensuring that this reversal isn’t the last word.

While communities explore
multifaceted approaches to the
entrenched problem of racial
segregation and inequality, social
scientists and advocates must
continue to build a research and
advocacy agenda to challenge the
premises of the recent Supreme
Court decision. The courts have
traditionally been the means of
accomplishing progress on racial
inequality, but perhaps it is time
to turn to other branches of government,
to state courts, and to
grassroots organizing and mobilization
in support of integration
and equality for all.

What is clear is that there is a
challenge ahead for those committed
to integration and equal opportunity.
Justice Stephen G.
Breyer, realizing that his court
brethren had further reduced the
mandate of Brown, concluded his
eloquent dissent by echoing Justice
Thurgood Marshall’s Milliken
dissent in writing, “This is a decision
that the court and the nation
will come to regret.”

The challenge for educators
and our society is ensuring that
this reversal isn’t the last word,
and that where diversity and
integration are still possible,
they be pursued intensely. We
must work for the day when
this decision will be seen as a
historical relic like Plessy v. Ferguson,
the 1896 decision upholding
the doctrine of “separate but
equal,” so that our nation’s students
and our country will be
prepared for the global economy
and rich interconnectedness of
the 21st century.

Gary Orfield is a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. Erica Frankenberg is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s graduate school of education, in Cambridge, Mass., and a research assistant at the Civil Rights Project. They are the co-editors of a forthcoming book, Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in American Schools.

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